Recently, there has been a proliferation of social networking services. Such social networking services are typically configured to enable online communities of people who might share interests or who are interested in the interests and/or activities of others to come together. Many social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to access content of interest and/or to become involved. Other social network services might be through various messaging schemes, such as instant messaging, tweets, email, RSS alerts, and so forth. Non-exhaustive examples of different social networking services, include facebook, twitter, myspace, and delicious, to name just a few.
One issue with many of these services however, arises because people may be members of so many different services. Therefore, there is often a desire to filter some of the content that may be produced by writers for a social network to reduce the amount of content that a member might receive. Filtering of content tends to provide several other benefits to a social networking service member, including providing the member with a level of trust with their social network's ties and acquaintances. Members may also benefit because they share similar interests, and therefore, they tend to learn and grow through information discovery that may arise through a diffusion of information through such networks or social circles.
While a promising idea, supporting such social networking services can be very challenging in practice. This is often because each member may have their own and very different social circle. Therefore, providing filtered content for each individual across their varying social networks may have a level of complexity of n2, where n is a number of people in a given social group. In addition, different content producers or writers, may produce content at different rates, and at different times, thereby making it more difficult to ensure freshness of the filtered content. Thus, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the present invention has been made.